Guest Review: Sergeant on On Cigarette Papers

The unusual
nature of On Cigarette Papers is
described in a foreword. In 1935 Pam Zinnemann-Hope’s parents – mother German,
father German-Jewish – eloped from Nazi Germany to Russia, where they were
imprisoned during the Stalinist purges, before escaping to England. Following
their deaths Zinnemann-Hope found ‘an archive of letters, photos and objects’
left by her mother; included in these was a tiny pile of cigarette papers on
which recipes had been written. These were the launching point for ‘a journey
of discovery through [her] parents’ story and the wider story of [her] family.’
Some of the poems are written in her own voice; others take on the voices of
her parents and grandparents, and switch between German and English.

Unsurprisingly,
given the drama, heartbreak and intimacy bound up with this journey, the volume
is deeply felt. The poems are written in a sparsely referential, staccato style
that hints at the brittleness of these people’s lives and communication, as
they are shunted across borders and languages by forces beyond their control.
Occasionally the style also hints at, not so much the limitations, as the brute
simplicity of the affiliations and identities through which her parents picked
their way; as in ‘Oma Leah Hears The News’, which reads in its entirety:

When Kurt and
Lottie tell me that they’ll marry

I fall to my
knees immediately,

I beg you,
please don’t choose my son, Lottie,

I want him to
live with me.

Of course I would
prefer if you were Jewish!

The absence of
lyricism, of the complex music and use of language which normally constitute
poetry, gives a sense of the vacuuming gulfs which threatened these people, and
in which so much of their story has been lost, despite the poet’s best attempts
at reclamation. As if she clutched into the dark for a flower and came back
with the tiny shred of a leaf. Recipes, letters and a proclamation from a
Borough Council are also folded into the volume, with what seems a minimum of
alteration, just the chopping of prose into poetic lines. The volume relies not
on any poetic technique or accomplishment but on the immensity of the story
from which it arises. Another way to conceive of it is as bulletins from a story
we don’t get to read, which perhaps doesn’t even exist anymore – and indeed,
Zinnemann-Hope’s talent is strongly novelistic, as she gives a sense of the
characters’ individuality, and deftly selects the incidents which form the
stepping stones through her river of lost time.

It is this very
novelistic quality which also gives one curious effect of the volume, as it
vies with the documentary, testimonial function implied by its vocabulary of
‘archive’ and ‘letters’, by the lack of any kind of poeticism, by the individualised
first person voices which relay the lives of all the characters, parents, grandparents
and poet. Zinnemann-Hope makes clear in her foreword that what follows is ‘her
version of the truth’, but still, the admission that her parents barely spoke
of what they’d undergone exists in a strange tension with the speaking that
follows. In what sense is this letter an actual letter? I found myself thinking, these words words that were spoken or
thought? How far is this the poet’s and how far the historical characters’
‘truth’? The obvious rejoinder is does
it matter? but I think that in our culture and in this context it does, though
perhaps for no very good reason: hence the furore that accompanies memoirs,
however powerful and historically accurate, which turn
out to be invented. The issue is particularly pressing for a volume that relies
so much on the testifying voice, and whose sparseness is compensated for by documentary
history, the power of what actually happened, was said, seen or thought. An
afterword entitled ‘Sources’ expands a little further on the division between
‘inspiration and information’ in some of the poems, as with this note:

The letter Grossvater Erich wrote to my mother (in
German) is in the archive. ‘It’s been thirteen years since I heard from you’ is
the only quote, though he does mention his cough.

It’s a slightly
disconcerting experience to then have to rejig in our memory the poem to which
this note refers, ‘Translation Of A Letter From Grossvater Erich, To My
Mother’, in which the man’s voice recounts memories such as these:

When you were
here

I took you to
the Bulgarian forests.

That’s where my
memories gather

They gather mushrooms;

They gather some
for me and some for you.

Were these
forests mentioned, like ‘the cough’? Were the mushrooms? And to this end, and
in something like these words? Of course, we understand through stories, we
remember through stories; our sense of other people’s lives is often a compound
of fact and fiction, ‘translated’ through ourselves. And perhaps this is
Zinnemann-Hope’s point, that what she calls in the foreword her ‘sense of
identity’ is fluid and malleable and has to be built up – can be rebuilt – from
the materials available. But it’s a strange way of ‘holding a conversation’
with the dead, a phrase that grows stranger the more it’s thought on. How do
they answer back? How do they think? Whose voice are we actually hearing, and
how

David Sergeant, born in 1979, is a British poet published by Shearsman.